Events

Conferences & Symposia

Take Note

"Take Note" brings together scholars from literature, history, media studies, information science, and computer science to explore the past and future roles of note-taking across the university. Panelists will discuss the history of note-taking in different disciplines as well as the potential of emerging digital annotation tools.

The conference will open with the launch of an online, interactive exhibition of notes held in Harvard University collections, in tandem with site visits that are free and open to the public to the libraries and museums that contributed to the exhibition.

The Atlantic reports, Harvard English professor Leah Price, one of the co-organizers of TakeNote, a conference dedicated to the history, theory, practice and future of note-taking, opened her introductory remarks with a much-circulated picture of Biden holding up his notes after this year's vice-presidential debate.

The Boston Globe Ideas section explores the increased interest in the study of notes, which unlock conversations around great works. In examining the scribblings that were once dismissed, scholars are unlocking real insights into the way people in the past read, thought, worked, loved, and joked. “Take Note,” a Radcliffe Institute conference addresses the rise of these once-marginal jottings as a topic in their own right.﻿﻿

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Considering how much attention we lavish on the technologies of writing—scroll, codex, print, screen—it's striking how little we pay to the technologies for digesting and regurgitating it. One way or another, there's no sector of the modern world that isn't saturated with note-taking. That was more than sufficient justification for holding a conference called Take Note, held at the Radcliffe Institute.

Radcliffe's "Take Note" conference explores the art and importance of effective note taking. The conference, the culmination of a four-year effort at Radcliffe to examine the tradition of books and their prospects in a digital age, brought together scholars from a range of disciplines.

The Harvard-Yenching Library holds Japanese books on falconry—the hunting of wild quarry using birds of prey—produced before 1800. They were most recently sighted during "Take Note," a two-day conference in November at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Leah Price, one of the conference organizers, referred to Sarah Palin's notes for her interview at a Tea Party convention in 2010. Palin's notes on her palm said Energy, Budget (Cut?), Tax, Lift American Spirits. The video of Palin consulting her palm went viral.

Institute conference brought together experts in book history and the digital humanities to look at notes as artifacts of creative thought.

"There is a complex story behind what is written in the margins and between the lines, whether on the page or on the screen. Take Note helps unlock these stories," said Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute at today's "Take Note" conference, which brings together more than 300 participants and scholars to explore the past and future of note-taking.

Blogger Christine Frost﻿ attended Radcliffe's lecture and 20 questions with Roger Chartier and writes, "The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has become an amazing place. It serves as a hub for collaborative projects that span Harvard University, and all disciplines, from humanities to the sciences, are explored in a variety of symposia and events."

I took 14 pages of notes about taking notes. Some may call it compulsive; I call it processing information!

The prospect of summarizing the Radcliffe Institute’s Take Note conference is daunting. Throughout the course of the day, I took more than 14 pages of notes about taking notes. Questions and comments from the audience produced lively conversations on Twitter. The hashtag (#radtakenote) was one of the most active I’ve ever seen at such an event.﻿

The world of libraries is being shaken by the digital age, changing patterns of readership, information retrieval, perhaps even brain circuitry. The dance toward the digital drew archivists from around the world to Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for a workshop on technology and archival processing.

Archivists are grappling worldwide with new technologies to navigate an emerging, quickening, and expanding digital age. That struggle was the focus of a two-day Radcliffe workshop on technology and archival processing.